Chapter 1:After the Welfare State

Were in favor of a lot of things, and were against mighty few Lyndon Johnson, 1964
I hate the Republicans and everything they stand for
Howard Dean, 2005

WHAT WILL come after the welfare state?After 120 years, at the turn of the twenty-first century, it is clearly
showing its age.Its great initiativesuniversal education, universal
superannuation, universal health carehave become corrupt monstrosities
sucking up vast resources for a modest return.Its devotees are reduced to more and more desperate stratagems to hold
onto political power and to maintain the sinecures and the pensions of its
functionaries and followers.The
welfare state is no longer a grand new vision, but a patched up expedient, an
aging dynasty that may have lost the mandate of heaven.Its strategy is all about hanging on.

Of course, back in the nineteenth century when the welfare
state was conceived, nobody could have imagined how its vision would actually
turn out after the glow of reform had receded and its taxes and benefits had
become routine.The brains behind
it all, the German Marxists and British Fabians, had seen the misery of the
workers and were determined to use other peoples money to relieve their
sufferings.The Marxists knew that
the suffering of the workers was due to their oppression by the bourgeoisie, and
the Fabians knew that it was due to the waste and inefficiency of Individualism
and the higgling of the market.A
grand narrative was developed to explain the welfare state in the form of a
three-act play.In the golden age
of the middle ages, the poor were treated with compassion and understanding, as
the church led society by example to make proper provision for the poor and the
indigent, formalizing its customs into the Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601.But this was followed by the Fall under the influence of the classical
economists and laissez-faire ideology.In the nineteenth century the poor were stigmatized as morally flawed,
categorized into worthy and unworthy, and the indigent were
barracked into the hell of indoor relief in union workhouses and county
almshouses.But a new age dawned as
the nineteenth century progressed, the new age of the professional and national
welfare state run by educated and compassionate activists and informed by modern
social science research.

Despite the belief that the welfare state was
established in the teeth of opposition from aristocratic reactionaries, the
truth is that it was founded in Germany by the aristocratic reactionary Otto von
Bismarck, who implemented the program of the Social Democratic opposition to
cool the ardor of their supporters and increase support for the Prussian
monarchy he served.It wasnt
very long before Britains Edward VII added his royal approval: We are all
socialists now.Thus endorsed by
progressives and reactionaries, the movement went from strength to strength in
the first half of the twentieth century.It
organized the poor into great political machines, and turned government into a
vast patronage operation to reward them for their support.It also provided a vast and satisfying role for the governing classes: to
cook up and serve the complicated menu of benefits that the welfare state would
distribute.By
the 1920s an array of commentators had decided that mastering the growing
complexity of life in the city was beyond capacity of the average citizen.Experts would construct the complex institutions and programs that the
average citizen needed but was incompetent to construct or to choose.

Even as the welfare state continues its inexorable
expansion into the twenty-first century, sensitive observers have sensed a
change in the wind.Electoral
success for socialist parties has begun to be difficult.After winning one out of five presidential elections in the
1970s and 1980s in the United States, moderate Democrats formed the Democratic
Leadership Council to move the Democratic Party towards the political center and
fueled the presidential candidacy of Bill Clinton.After losing four straight elections in the United Kingdom, leader Tony
Blair reinvented the Labour Party into New Labour as a party of the center
rather than an orthodox party of the left.A mini-industry of books has arisen to deal with the evident senescence
of the welfare state political movement.In
The Politics of Meaning, Michael Lerner has attempted to find a new way
for progressive politics to recover an identification with the spiritual and
escape from its identification with material security and well being.In The Radical Center, Ted Halstead and Michael Lind attempt to
find a radical middle political ground for the plurality of Americans who
identify neither with the Democratic party or the Republican party but that
takes ideas from both parties: from the right, ending the corporate income tax
and affirmative action; and from the left, a mandatory national health insurance
and equalized school funding nationwide.In
The Underclass, Ken Auletta looks at the culture of the underclass and
concludes that carrot and stick are needed to help the poor get off their
hustles and get into the formal economy.This movement represents an attempt to define a Third Way, a compromise
between the perceived orthodoxy of welfare statism on the left, and pro-business
bourgeois politics on the right.

But to characterize the Third Way as a movement is
misleading.Both in its incarnation
in the United States under the guidance of the Democratic Leadership Council and
in the United Kingdom as New Labour, the Third Way is a top-down expedient, an
effort by political leaders to rescue their parties from the political
wilderness: to stop losing at the polls.Both
in the United States and the United Kingdom the model of left-wing
progressivisma working class party led by the best and the brightestwas
breaking down, losing contact with the great mass of voters that were no longer
working class in outlook or as responsive to the class war politics that had
proved such a potent winner in the middle years of the twentieth century.The Third Way is best understood as an attempt by savvy political leaders
to head their political parties away from the precipice, to return them to power
and keep them there.It is, in
fact, the progressive movement in its Tory phase, a strategic retreat by a
mature power hierarchy, maintaining power by brilliant strategic maneuver, but
slowly yielding ground step by step to the wave of the future.It has not yet asked itself whether its strategy negates the whole
socialist vision.It has certainly
not conducted a dialogue with the rank-and-file progressives who remain deeply
suspicious of their modernizing leaders.

In The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of
Egalitarianism, economist and Nobel Prize laureate Robert William Fogel got
as close as any progressive has dared to the root of the problem.A liberal iconoclast who was not afraid to write about the economic
benefits to the American slave owners, he understood the perilous strategic
position of the progressive forces at the end of the twentieth century.Though proud that the progressive political program had improved the
material condition of the poor dramatically over the last century, he had to
admit that it failed in its central promise.The progressives had claimed that the social question, the
scandalous material deprivation of the huddled masses in the great industrial
cities, could be solved by material improvement.The idea that the poor were drowning in vice, and needed a program of
character building and embourgeoisification, was a vicious canard.What the poor lacked were material resources that had been denied them by
an oppressive and uncaring political system.The poor were like the cultivators of parched fields denied
water in a valley drained by a great river.A small dam, a modest network of distribution canals was surely all that
stood between misery and prosperity.Why
not do it, make the desert flower, and raise the poor to prosperity?With a helping hand the poor would soon rise, not just to middle class
standards of living, but recover to the natural sense of community that they had
lost when pitched into industrial servitude.

[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists, she offered, smiling but meaning it.Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican

[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State

[The Axial Age] highlights the conception of a responsible self... [that] promise[s] man for the first time that he can understand the fundamental structure of reality and through salvation participate actively in it.Robert N Bellah, "Religious Evolution", American Sociological Review, Vol. 29, No. 3.

[In the] higher Christian churches... they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy. Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values

Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...David Martin, On Secularization

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self